


Consume Me

by linguamortua



Category: Venom (Comics), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Other, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Superheroes, Symbiotic Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-01 15:28:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16287140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: Eddie Brock is not doing well. He’s trying to juggle his one-man investigative show The Brock Report, traumatic memories of the past few months, and an alien parasite with constant demands for human meat. Oh yeah—and there’s his little drinking problem. The drinking problem that makes it harder and harder to resist Venom’s dark desires. But larger forces are at work, and soon Eddie will need to find a way to take control of his life and his symbiote. Because he and Venom are the only thing standing in the way of the Life Foundation… again.Man, Eddiereallyhates those guys.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So we meet again, Monsterfuckers Anonymous. Want more weird alien content? I'm [lingua_mortua](https://twitter.com/lingua_mortua) on Twitter and [lingua-mortua](http://lingua-mortua.tumblr.com) on Tumblr.
> 
> DECEMBER 19th UPDATE: this fic is on indefinite hiatus. Sorry, folks! I'm just not feeling it right now, and I need to officially shelve it so it doesn't hang over my head. Subscribe, and if I get back to updating you'll be notified.

Eddie Brock cracked open his grainy eyes into the weak grey light of a fall morning. His head was pounding and he badly needed to take the worst kind of shit. The ashtray and vomit taste in his mouth made him want to puke all over again—or maybe it was the sour smell of three-day old sweat that was turning his stomach. Already he had the sinking feeling that it was long past the time he should be up and meeting with his boss. Carefully, he rolled onto his side. The room tilted. When he made a grab for his phone, it was dead. He fumbled it across the floor and plugged it in, noticing as he did so the dried blood scabbed across the knuckles of his right hand. 

All in all, a pretty normal morning for him these days.

He rolled out of bed and slithered half to the floor before he caught himself. Everything hurt. The kind of hurt that told him, if he’d needed more proof, that he somehow fucked up last night. He groaned as he made his way to the bathroom, and its inevitable horrors. Afterwards, he rested his head against the cool tiles and let the malfunctioning shower spray him down as best it could.

Inside him, something stirred.

 _Eddie_ , it said, judgmentally. _You’re a mess._

‘Thanks,’ Eddie said, his voice coming out in a dry rasp. He tipped his head back to drink some water from the shower head. Tasted metallic. He swirled it around his mouth and spat. 

With a towel around his hips he opened the fridge and looked for something to settle his stomach. There wasn’t much in there. He grabbed a beer and half a carton of take-out rice that had seen better days. Nuking it to hell in the microwave would probably kill any pathogens. Not that it mattered. A symbiote did wonders for the immune system. He sat on his bed to eat and turned on his phone. The little dots chased each other round the screen.

 _We are hungry,_ Venom said inside Eddie’s head.

‘Nah,’ Eddie told him around a mouthful of rice. ‘ _You’re_ hungry. I’m eating right now.’

_You know what I need._

‘Can’t hear you,’ Eddie said. His phone finally booted, showing him exactly how many voicemails his boss had left him. ‘Fuck,’ he said. The carton went into the garbage bin from a distance, leftover rice hitting the wall and sticking. He dressed in last night’s jeans and a clean-smelling t-shirt. No clean socks. He jammed his bare feet into his sneakers. 

Outside it was damp with a heavy, cloudy sky. Eddie hustled along the street trying not to puke up his breakfast and made the bus by inches. He scrunched his eyes shut and clung to the handrail as it swayed around corners. Venom muttered and complained in a subvocal buzz. Eddie ignored him. When Eddie was hungover and felt like ass, Venom seemed subdued. So Venom was subdued pretty much every morning, really. It never truly shut him up, but it was like the symbiote fed on his energy. When Eddie was fired up and ready to sink his teeth into a story, Venom had boundless energy to match. When Eddie was leaning with his forehead against a metal pole on a bus, Venom didn’t seem to have the strength to complain in anything louder than a murmur.

The symbiote was barely audible on the bus, and down the two blocks to the skyscraper overlooking the bay. He was silent as Eddie ducked through security and gave Richard a high five that barely connected. Richard called after him but Eddie was gone, into an open elevator and soaring up, up to the top floor. He closed his eyes again and shoved two pieces of chewing gum into his mouth. 

On high, Jack was installed behind his desk when his assistant escorted Eddie in. She never would give him the time of day, but somehow on this particular morning she looked sympathetic. Which probably meant he was in trouble. Or really fucking pathetic. Pathetic sometimes used to work on Anne. Eddie had long ago figured out that there was a certain kind of woman—smart, organised, life together—who couldn’t stop herself from trying to fix a guy. Eddie was okay with being fixed by that kind of woman. It didn’t tend to stick, but the attention sure was nice.

He walked to the centre of the room and stopped there. Any closer to the windows and he got vertigo. He already felt enough like shit for one day.

‘C’mon, Eddie,’ said Jack, gazing at Eddie like a disappointed father. Fuck. Eddie hated the disappointed father face. ‘I thought we had a deal. I hire you. You give me the good shit.’

‘Yeah,’ said Eddie, staring at the carpet. He really, really didn’t want to look out of the windows.

‘You did great work with Cletus Kasady. So what’s the hold-up on the corruption story?’

‘No hold-up,’ said Eddie. He couldn’t meet Jack’s eye.

‘No hold-up?’ Jack’s voice crept up the scale just a notch. ‘You’re two weeks late, Eddie. We had to slap together some bullshit greatest hits reel for you last week. Week before that was half-assed. And now you show up two hours late looking like trash and smelling worse.’

‘Sorry,’ Eddie said, very low. ‘Just going through some stuff.’

‘Stuff?’ Jack asked. ‘Since when have you had stuff? What the hell kind of stuff?’

‘It’s, y’know, a personal thing. Issues. People. Relationships.’

Jack’s irritation dissipated quickly, as it always did, replaced by a vaguely patrician look of concern. 

‘People? You never see _anyone_., Eddie. Everyone’s noticed. There are folks concerned.’ A journalist’s careful touch there; Jack not coming right out and saying that _he_ was concerned. Nice. Real nice.

‘Right,’ Eddie said, ‘totally. You’re right. I’ll get you the thing, the footage, Jack. Soon. It’s gonna be good.’ He beat a hasty retreat. Any more questions would be bad. Jack had been a damn good journalist in his day, and in fact was known to still put out the occasional, well-crafted expose or investigative piece when he wanted it done properly. He knew all the pressure points.

So Eddie had to produce. He had to come up with something on this corruption story, and fast. Jack had given him a second chance. There wouldn’t be a third. 

By eleven o’clock he was lurking around the library information desk, looking for business records. Shortly afterwards, he sat and scrolled through digitised manifests, bills of sale and contracts, looking for proof of what he knew must be there. The proof that an elected official had used his position to make some sweet business deals. The trail of evidence that should lead from there to fraud, and from fraud to a suite of other unsavoury activities including, Eddie was convinced, attempts at voter disenfranchisement.

‘Work the case, Eddie,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘Do the research. Don’t go in guns blazing. We’re a reputable news agency.’

 _Who cares?_ Venom asked, as irritated as Eddie was.

‘I care,’ Eddie told him in a whisper, which was a lie. He printed some documents, rolled them up and shoved them into his coat pocket. Jack would ask for them at some point. He felt itchy, almost, leaving the library. Ready to crawl out of his own skin. Which, of course, would leave his skin vacant for Venom. So maybe best not to. He snorted a laugh to himself, and a passing woman gave him an uncertain look.

 _Eddie_ , said Venom. _Let’s go out._

‘We are out.’

 _Really out_.

‘No.’

When Venom said ‘out’, he meant, ‘hunting’. And hunting was people. Killing people. When Eddie had said that they could kill bad people, he hadn’t realised how many bad people it would take to satiate his symbiote. Or how much he, Eddie, would hate the process. The shrieks of Venom’s victims. The feeling of Venom wresting control away from him. The wash of fear as Venom fed, osmosed somehow into Eddie’s nervous system in raw human sympathy. He shuddered. It was worse than he could possibly have imagined.

He hit the streets, pacing some of his old haunts, checking in with some folks he knew. Amazing what you could learn from homeless informants when they trusted you. When you gave them the time of day. Eddie had smokes in his pocket and he traded them for information. Just bits and pieces. Not enough for a story on their own, but keeping an ear to the ground was how he got the stories. The odd rumour; people disappearing here, weird noises from a storm drain there.

Nothing concerning. Nothing, too, that suggested that Venom’s nighttime activities were being noticed. Regular.

Mid-afternoon. Back towards home with the sun in his eyes. Eddie was thirsty and his head still hurt. Venom was quiet, for the most part. Unless they walked past somewhere cooking meat. Eddie couldn’t smell a fucking steak anymore without Venom demanding flesh. It had put him right off. Home, down his street. He checked in with Mrs Chan downstairs and bought a six-pack and some whiskey. It looked suspicious in his basket, so he threw in ramen, a tin of soup and some crackers.

‘More booze, Eddie?’ Mrs Chan asked, immediately disappointed.

‘You know, keeps the engine running,’ said Eddie, head down. He was tired of disappointing people. She rang him up and he paid in cash, grimy notes from his jeans pocket. He couldn’t remember when he’d put them in there. 

‘You need a nice girlfriend!’ Mrs Chan called out as he left her store. He raised one hand in the universal signal for ‘okay’ and got the hell out of dodge.

‘Great fucking day,’ he said to his apartment as he walked through the door. Douchebag across the hall was quiet, at least. He cracked open a can and drank. The rest went in the fridge. Eddie went to sit against the wall, low down out of line of sight of the windows. After those guys busted into his place he’d repaired the door and picked up new furniture, but he never did like feeling too exposed now. He drank.

_Stop it._

‘Stop what, pal?’

_You know._

‘Nah, I don’t.’

 _The liquor,_ said Venom. _We need better fuel._

‘This is okay.’

 _Let’s go out. Out to a bar. Don’t just sit in here like a loser, Eddie._

‘No,’ said Eddie, grimly necking his drink. He coughed. This was how Venom worked. He’d wait until a quiet moment and then start in with the cajoling. He liked when Eddie went out to a bar because there was a higher chance of Eddie winding up stumbling drunk. For a while, that had helped Eddie forgot how deeply fucked up his life had become. But then he realised that it was easy, so easy, for Venom to get control of him. To snag someone in a dark alley. So he stopped going out.

 _Eddie_ , said Venom, in a voice that sounded as hollow as Eddie felt, _you're killing us._

‘Maybe I’m just killing you,’ Eddie said. His top lip peeled back off his teeth in an imitation of Venom’s rictus smile. 

_I refuse,_ Venom snarled. Eddie felt him ripple under his skin for a moment. He resisted. It was possible to do that, to an extent. Venom just didn’t get to take over whenever he wanted. Within him, Venom struggled harder. _Don’t you want to feel alive, Eddie?_ Venom said. 

Eddie opened his mouth to answer, but his reply was eaten up in a burst of noise. Above him, there was a crashing from the fire escape, and then the window smashed. Eddie’s beer rolled away as he flung himself down against the floor.

‘Jesus,’ he said into the floorboards. His heart pounded. He turned to look at the window and saw, in the evening light, what he had feared. Someone was climbing in through the window. Someone was getting into his apartment. The body pulled itself up over the windowsill and then half-fell, hitting the floor with a dull noise.

It tried to say something. Eddie, on his hands and knees, froze. It was moving. It was trying to speak. It spoke, in a creaking, agonised voice.

‘Help us, Eddie Brock. Help us.’


	2. Chapter 2

‘Oh no,’ said Eddie, shuffling backwards on his knees. ‘No no no. Not interested.’ The person on the floor was collapsed in on themselves, a dark shape in the dark room. One hand was flung out sideways in a claw. Eddie’s pulse was beating in his throat, choking him. His beer was threatening to make a repeat appearance. It was happening again, he thought. Men in tac gear, coming for him. Coming for him and Venom. Taking Venom away. Hurting them. His fingertips gripped at the floor until they hurt.

 _Eddie._ At first Eddie thought he was imagining it, and then he heard it again: ‘Eddie.’

‘Shut up,’ Eddie said out loud. The person’s voice cracked as they tried to speak again.

‘We’re dying,’ said the person, eventually. Their voice was very quiet. Despite himself, Eddie was leaning in to hear better. 

‘We?’ Eddie asked, even though he already knew the answer.

 _They’re like us,_ said Venom.

‘We’re like you,’ said the body on the floor. A wave of dizziness came over Eddie. His head hung down between his shoulder blades like a creature bending to drink. The nightmarish spectre of Carlton Drake rose in his mind’s eye; but no, even in the dim light he could see that the human, the host, had light skin and blond hair. They were in a t-shirt and sweatpants, their feet bare. 

Eddie peeled himself off the floor and turned on the light, which flickered gamely to life. The person’s—the man’s—feet were bleeding. He was less a healthy pink than a grey. Within him Eddie, horrified, could see the twist and ripple of a yellowish symbiote.

‘Who are you?’ Eddie asked.

‘We are Helios.’

_Helios is not a real name._

‘Yes it is,’ said Eddie. ‘It’s a sun god. Greek.’

_Helios is not a Klyntar name._

‘What is Helios?’ Eddie asked.

‘A fabrication. A creation. A doomed birth.’

‘You’re being really weird right now, man.’ Eddie went to the fridge for another beer. It was the only thing he could think to do. He sat down against the kitchen island, two metres from the man on the ground.

‘Eddie Brock,’ the man said again, and midway through the sentence his voice suddenly dropped into a deep gravel not unlike that of Venom. ‘There is not much time.’

‘Time to what?’

‘Time. For us. We are dying.’

‘Where did you come from?’ Some tiny part of Eddie’s brain remembered how investigative journalism worked.

‘Life.’

‘The Life Foundation?’

‘Yes. We were a technician. We were a volunteer for an experiment.’

‘What kind of an experiment?’

‘The birth of new symbiotes.’

 _Abomination!_ Venom shrieked inside Eddie’s head. He was churning away in there, thrashing in Eddie’s mind like a shark scenting chum.

‘Okay, shut up,’ Eddie said to the room at large. All three other people, or things, in the room. ‘All of you, shut up.’ He reevaluated his stance on impromptu investigative journalism, and finished his beer. The symbiote-host on the floor was breathing in a wet gurgle. Its fingers were twitching a little, in the same way that Venom’s tendrils liked to explore fine objects. ‘How many,’ he said at last.

 _Too many,_ said Venom.

‘How many other symbiotes are there? New ones?’

‘Dozens are dead,’ said the body on the floor. It was almost seizing now, twitching and writhing. ‘Hundreds were made. Many died in the creation. Dozens are dead. In boxes. In tubes. In glass rooms.’ It retched, and a long string of symbiote-stuff curled from its mouth and then back in again. The person, the man—Eddie still couldn’t decide which—looked as though he was melting.

 _There were four of us,_ said Venom. _Riot, Toxin, Venom, Phage._ Venom had never said their names before. The investigative part of Eddie’s brain filed away the question: how would you translate those names? Why did they all imply death and chaos? He refocused.

‘All dead except you?’ What if more of them were coming. What if Carlton Drake was still alive. What if.

_All dead._

‘Dead,’ echoed the dying technician and his symbiote.

‘What could have made new symbiotes?’ Venom made a long, low growling sound. Eddie couldn’t fathom it. Like invading a host body wasn’t weird enough, Venom had told him a little about Klyntar reproduction. Eddie was maybe the only person who knew the name of Venom’s home planet, let alone how more little symbiotelings were made. He thought he was immune to freaky shit by now.

‘Cloning,’ gurgled the symbiote’s deep voice. ‘Splicing.’

 _Kill them_ , Venom snarled inside Eddie’s head. He was barging around in there, making a mess. Eddie tried hard to focus on how completely he, Eddie Brock, human, was inhabiting his own body. _Kill them now_.

Eddie shook his head like a dog with ear mites. 

‘They’re already dead,’ he said. And it was true. Almost within touching distance, the technician-symbiote dyad sputtered out a rattling breath and died. It died in a pneumoniac, wet sound; it choked on its own fluids that trickled and then burst out of the man’s mouth, rolling into the cracks in the hardwood floor. The man had an odd arch to his back. He was very thin, Eddie noticed now. That would be the symbiote’s energy requirements consuming both of their bodies to eke out a little more life. 

_Good_ , Venom said. 

‘What are you, jealous?’ asked Eddie. There was a trickle of blood, of something, making its way along the floor towards his foot. Inexplicably, he let it touch his sock before he stepped away.

_How would you like it if someone cloned your brothers and sisters like that?_

‘Fine, I wouldn’t. Fuck, what do we do with the body?’ He walked half way around it and then looked at the broken window. He hurriedly pulled the shutter closed. Then he listened for a moment. No noise from the rest of the building. With suddenly trembling hands, Eddie pulled the old scratchy blanket off his sofa and covered the body and its mess. Okay, he wasn’t immune to freaky shit. Well played, universe.

 _Burn it,_ said Venom. _And then burn all the others._

‘We can’t burn down the Life Foundation, okay? Even if they’re assholes. We can’t burn anything. We gotta be careful.’ Jack’s serious face came swimming up in Eddie’s memory before he shoved it back down. He couldn’t be weird. He couldn’t do anything weird right now. ‘We can’t do anything weird right now,’ Eddie said, to the alien parasite who lived inside him and sometimes could control him, and turn into a giant monster. He stifled a horrible laugh. His mouth was very dry; he was thirsty again.

 _Burn them_ , Venom repeated.

‘No, Christ.’

_Remember when you used to be fun?_

‘The last time you thought we were having fun, we were in a fucking motorcycle chase with the cops,’ Eddie snapped. His sock was wet at the toe. It squished as he paced the floor.

_It _was/i > fun._ _

__

__

Eddie ignored Venom, and let him mutter away. He came up to the window sideways, wary always of sightlines now, and looked out. Below him, the city was patched with lights and he could hear sirens off in the distance. Someone on the street was shouting something incoherent, but in that way that Eddie knew meant nothing. It was just anger, or booze, or crazy. He knew a thing or two about all three. 

He knew about the anger and the booze. The anger had always been there. Journalism was a form of plausible deniability for the angry man, he had found. Righteous anger would do. And the drinking was a byproduct. Find a journalist who doesn’t drink. 

The crazy was new. It was crazy that Venom felt like a normal addition to Eddie’s life. Even when he was tearing off some poor loser’s limbs in an alley, having Venom riding along felt like it was supposed to work. Once, Anne had laughed in fond exasperation and told Eddie that he was a black hole of neediness. A sad puppy. Anne had always enjoyed being needed, so that worked out. Now Venom filled maybe 99% of that black hole. He filled it in the most insane way, but that was just Eddie’s bad fucking luck. 

The other percent was still up for grabs. A really good story could do it. Like the really good story that he was supposed to be chasing right now. At this particular moment in time, nine-oh-something in the evening, Eddie should be writing up his notes and thinking about titles and scripting and edits and conversion rates; his job. He should be providing Jack with the next big thing, by being a big fucking deal at his job.

But right now Eddie was fucked. There was a dead dude on his floor. A dead dude in a puddle of symbiote slime, which already smelled about as bad as the grey-yellow puddle looked. It was coagulating. The dead guy had shit himself as he died, too. Eddie hated that he now knew that happened. Somehow, before Venom, he had not fully internalised it; the indignity of death. That there were worse things than dismemberment or crushing or collision. He looked down at the body like he was a very long way away. He inhabited his body, he reminded himself. To forget that was to invite a hostile takeover. Still, he had the unnerving feeling of hovering. 

And inside him, Venom was still rambling like a madman and making noises about wholesale murder in the Life Foundation’s laboratories. The worst part was that Eddie kind of agreed. If there was a boogeyman in his life, it was the idea of Carlton Drake and Riot having survived, in some implausible way. Like he and Venom had survived. And if Drake was alive he wouldn’t be holed up in a shitty flat worrying about his job. An atavistic impulse, shared wholly with Venom, was beating in Eddie’s heart; destroy the Foundation, destroy them all. And then he could—they could—be safe.

Eddie went back to the fridge and popped the top off a beer. It would be about now that he’d call Anne, if she wasn’t shacked up with Dan. It would be about now that he’d call Jack, if Jack wouldn’t immediately hang up on him. Or Dr Skirth, if she wasn’t dead. Or a friend, if he had any.

 _We have to kill them_ , said Venom. Deep down, Eddie knew he was right.

‘That’s your answer for everything.’

_It works._

‘Sure, for about five minutes, and then we get arrested.’

_Who can arrest us?_

‘Anyone with a flamethrower and a speaker.’

 _Liar_ , Venom said, lying.

‘This is so fucked,’ Eddie said, not really replying. ‘This is so fucked.’

 _It’s fun,_ Venom told him, and Eddie could see a sense-memory of Venom’s long, long rows of teeth forming into a Cheshire cat grin. He smiled too. A little of Venom’s enthusiasm bled over, sometimes. Was his heart still hammering from fear, or was it pumping from excitement? He was so fucked up. On the floor, the dead man’s symbiote was soaking into the blanket. His body couldn’t be more than one-twenty, one-thirty pounds. It’d fit in a dumpster. And Eddie had a spare can of gas on the back of his bike.

‘Oh man,’ he said.

 _It’s fun,_ Venom said again.

‘I’m gonna need trash bags’. Eddie set his beer down on the counter. He rolled up his sleeves. Venom hummed inside him, gleeful, consuming.


	3. Chapter 3

The dew was soaking into Eddie’s clothes and he was chilled through. He lay belly-down on the grass on a hill overlooking the Life Foundation’s glass complex. He hadn’t thought to bring a tarp or a thermos of coffee. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t eaten in a while either. The last twenty-four hours had been both unbearably long and unbelievably short. 

Unbearably long, because under cover of darkness he had bundled up the remnants of the Life Foundation’s unfortunate technician and his symbiote and dumped them in a janitor’s wagon from his apartment building stairwell. He was pretty sure nobody would miss the wagon. It had sat in that same stairwell for weeks, now. He was less sure that the technician wouldn’t be missed. Currently, what was left of him was buried under some garbage in the local flytipping zone of choice. 

Was that a good call? Probably not. But Eddie was kind of glad that he didn’t have a handy list of convenient body-hiding locations in his brain. Like, what would that say about him as a person?

It had taken ages to cross part of the city, the wagon heavy behind him and his back soaked with sweat. All the time, Venom was goading him, offering to take over. Or trying to persuade him to leave the wagon and go hunting. Or again lapsing back into his demands to kill everyone in the Life Foundation and light the whole building up. At every step, Eddie had been fighting against the weight of the body and the churning excitement of the symbiote. He had been fearful of being stopped by someone. Or that the smell of the body and its symbiote would alert someone to what he was doing. At the impromptu garbage dump, he had wiped down every inch of the wagon with a wad of paper towels from the pocket of his hoodie, and flung the wagon far, far away from the body. The blanket he used as a shroud, he dropped in a dumpster on the way home. A bottle of lighter fluid and a match set the whole bin burning. He didn’t stop to watch it.

And then back home, to a shivering, anxious night. A morning hunched fruitlessly over his story notes. A pacing, worried afternoon that sent him down to the corner store, to the door of a bar, back the other way to Anne’s street and then home again, all without speaking to another person or stopping. 

_Come on, Eddie_ , Venom had said to him eventually as it started to get dark. _Let’s go take a look around._

It was what Eddie desperately wanted to do. And what he wanted to stay a very, very long way from. He’d been thinking about it all day, despite his attempts at distraction. That was the unbearably short part. God, the thought of going anywhere near the Life Foundation again made him want to piss himself. Yeah, he was scared of them. And who wouldn’t be, if they’d been through what he had? As he had put his shoes on and slipped a jacket over his hoodie, he had realised that the past night and day had all been racing towards this moment. 

‘The inevitability of retraumatization,’ he mumbled to himself, quoting, he’d realised, some shrink that he’d interviewed years ago for a piece about drug users and trauma. ‘I do this to my fucking self.’

_Scared, Eddie?_

‘Obviously,’ Eddie said. He locked his door with trembling hands. ‘And you know I am.’

_Nothing’s going to hurt you_ , said Venom. His voice echoed around the inside of Eddie’s head. It was almost comforting. Venom was just as fucking crazy as Eddie, but somehow Eddie was reassured. He guessed that at least he wouldn’t get shot by a security guard. 

It was almost dark out, of course, and the sea moisture in the air hung heavily on Eddie’s hair and clothes. He walked fast down the alley behind his apartment, blowing out his breath hard with every third step. That helped keep him warm. His motorcycle was freezing through his jeans, but after a few blocks it warmed up a little. Venom’s metabolism helped, too. And Venom was excited, so Eddie could feel their shared physical systems revving up.

He came to the bottom of the long, sweeping road that led up to the Life Foundation’s headquarters. Killing the engine of his bike, he pushed it behind a tree and leaned it on its kickstand. People knew about his bike. That wasn’t paranoia, that was fact. He had a whole persona for the Brock Report. The bike was a part of it. And besides, the bike had probably shown up on the Foundation’s security cameras during the whole ‘getting infested by an alien parasite’ debacle. So here he was, doing dumb shit, _carefully_. 

Halfway up the hill he turned off the road, pushing his way through damp grass and bushes. Venom was a quizzical presence at the back of his skull, and so Eddie preempted the question.

‘Avoiding cameras,’ he whispered into the dark. It took longer than he thought to climb to the top of the hill, and then to cut across a patch of dead land until he found a suitable vantage point. When he lay down there, he could see the short distance across the deep cut of the road. The front entrance of the Foundation building was in plain sight. So was its sweeping glass atrium, lit even after hours. Probably so everyone knew those assholes were so rich they didn’t have to worry about their electricity bill. 

Reaching into his pocket, Eddie pulled out his folding binoculars. He unfolded them like a birdwatcher and propped them up on a rock so he wouldn’t have to hold them the whole time. His phone’s recording app was open. It seemed like some secret agent shit, to lie here in the hope of discerning some kind of security schedule. But if they were going to break into the lab this time, they’d have to avoid being seen. 

This time, there was no Dr Skirth to help him out.

He had liked her. She was way too earnest for her line of work, proven by the fact that she was now dead. In another life, though, Eddie could have imagined taking her out on a date and _really_ disappointing her.

_Why are you thinking sad thoughts_ , Venom asked.

‘Because my life is sad,’ Eddie told him, accidentally telling the truth in a way that made him feel gross and exposed.

_Wow_ , Venom said.

‘I hate that you know the word ‘wow’,’ Eddie told Venom. ‘I also hate that you know what sarcasm is.’ Venom slithered his way out of the tense join between Eddie’s neck and shoulder and smiled toothily at him in the dark.

_Have we watched enough, yet?_

‘We have not,’ Eddie said. Down in the illuminated building, an aging, overweight security guard had his feet up on the reception desk. He looked half asleep. But if Eddie had any street smarts at all, the security guard would be the least of his worries. Experience had taught him that the Life Foundation was a high-tech operation.

How had the doctor got them in? There had been a security check at the gate, and a keycard. And then there had been guards patrolling the lower levels. Real ones, private security. Codes to get in to the individual lab sections. Cameras. Loads of cameras. Which meant that there would be recordings.

Venom’s face had melted back into Eddie’s shoulder, but the symbiote wasn’t exactly being quiet. Each time Eddie panned his binoculars across the building below, Venom had something to say about it. Mostly that something sounded a lot like, ‘we should go ahead and do a ton of murder’. So Eddie ignored him. Instead, he was trying to hatch a plan. He figured the cameras were key. Maybe he didn’t need to get down to the laboratory levels again. Maybe he could just hit the security room and steal the video footage from the building. Leak that to the press. 

Quietly.

Very quietly, because Jack would shoot him into space if he released unverified, stolen footage on the Brock Report. And then Eddie would lose his job. Of course, he would probably also lose his job if he unleashed Venom on the Life Foundation’s allegedly hard-working and honest personnel. And if he was caught trespassing tonight. And if he didn’t go home immediately and finish up the episode he was supposed to be writing.

‘Go big or go home,’ he said.

_Exactly,_ Venom agreed.

‘Not you,’ said Eddie. He shivered, underprepared. He thought about being home, and drinking coffee. Then he thought about the dark stain on the wooden floor, and about his bedclothes burning in a dumpster. The security guard in the lobby had his chin on his chest now, and was napping in a way that Eddie wished were possible for him. The guardhouse on the road had a light on, and a guy reading a magazine. 

_We could just kill him,_ suggested Venom. _It would be easy._ He sent Eddie a sense-memory of the goons breaking into Eddie’s apartment last year, and how he, Venom, had torn them into shreds while Eddie watched.

‘It’s too easy,’ Eddie said. ‘Killing’s too easy.’

_For me. Not you. You’re a coward._

‘Not wanting to kill people doesn’t make me a coward.’

_On my planet it does,_ said Venom. He sounded smug.

‘I don’t care.’ Eddie whispered it into the dark. Thinking about the men in his apartment made him feel sick. His hands felt weak and shaky on the binoculars. 

_Would you care if someone tried to separate us?_

Eddie lay there a long time in the grass, thinking about that question. Caught somewhere between the total lack of privacy and the endless violence was a smooth, shining pearl; that Venom had bonded with him more deeply than anyone or anything else that Eddie had ever known. That Venom had killed for him, and would again. That he could be living in a cardboard box with no job, no family, no future, and Venom would still somehow be a part of him. Any time, Venom could leave him and pass through other humans until he found a second compatible host. Logically, it was exactly what Venom _should_ do. God knows, Eddie figured he wasn’t worth the time and effort. But Venom stayed. Venom stayed for him, Eddie Brock.

‘Yes,’ he said, finally.

_Would you kill someone?_

‘If you couldn’t?’

_Yes._

Eddie didn’t reply. He lay there with his clothes damp until the horizon started to blush with dawn. Neither of them spoke on the way back down the hill to his bike. They didn’t need to. 

They both knew that Eddie had wanted to say yes.


End file.
